There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, “Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.
How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?
Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.
Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.
There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the “meaning” of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.
Any genuine work of art generates new work.
I don’t believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are – an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.
How can you be alienated without first having been connected?
Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
See the moon? It hates us.
Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.
The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.
Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
Maybe writing can’t be taught, but editing can be taught – prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.